China and the World of Business • China Business and the World

Category: Insights and Ahas

“It would be a big mistake to adapt to a market,” [Patek Philippe owner Thierry Stern] told the Straits Times in an interview. “If people like Patek Philippe, it’s because they like the design and the philosophy of the brand. If you start to adapt yourself to every market, you are going to lose that.”

Thierry should be lauded for not adapting Patek-Philippe for China. This is a man who understands the problems that arise when you start pandering to your market rather than catering to it.

That said, not every company shows up in China with a Patek Philippe brand cachet or customer base, and few brands could get away with imitating Stern’s strategy.

The lesson to learn from Thierry Stern’s approach is that the decision on whether or not to adapt your strategy, your product, or your entire company to China has to be based on a clear understanding of your appeal with Chinese consumers, as well as a recognition of what you might lose globally by making compromises for a single market.

However, the cost of providing customers with devices and gadgets to gain access to new tech and maintaining them is not a small expenditure for most luxury fashion businesses. What’s more, when a customer is enthusiastic about testing a hi-tech headset in a store, it does not necessarily guarantee that he or she has the desire to purchase a $1,500 handbag.

I confess that when I began my career thirty-odd years ago, I saw the luxury fashion industry as an easy target for ridicule: alien rituals and strange affectations aside, I found it hard to give credence to a group so focused on the capricious whims of the planet’s most pampered posteriors. That perception was both short-sighted and immature.

The opportunity I had to watch China’s luxury market sprout and blossom has given me a different perspective. Luxury consumers are an informal yet exacting standards body. I have found that the more that we can conduct any consumer-oriented business or marketing activity in accordance with the standards of this rarified niche, the better we can serve all consumers.

That’s why I was fascinated by this London panel talking about the use of technology (specifically augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)) to sell more luxury fashion.

One truism I’ve never forgotten about luxury customers: they all want the most fulfilling possible experience delivered with the least possible friction. The gratuitous application of kludgy technology (and, let’s face it, while AR and VR are getting better, neither are ready to fulfill their promise) seems to be a guaranteed way to chase luxury buyers out of your store.

Which leads to a second truism: The well-to-do are not early adopters. They’re the demanding knife-edge of the mainstream user, the guardians of the far side of the chasm twixt “niche product” and “widespread adoption” into which so many promising inventions fall.

If you can tweak a technology or product to the point wherein you can match the exacting standards of the luxury consumer, the big-time awaits. Smartphones went mainstream when the iPhone passed the lux test; satellite radio went wide after Damlier, Toyota, Nissan and BMW were able to make them accessible to finicky upscale buyers; and electronic cars went mainstream when Tesla introduced its luxury roadster and Toyota made the Prius hip with the well-to-do.

China is no exception to this rule. The Chinese luxury consumer often shares as much of her psychographic profile with her counterparts in Europe and North America as she does with her home-girls in Shanghai or Bengbu. Until you can offer her a great experience with the minimum of friction, forget about being first-to-market: go back to the lab.

Late last year I noted that life after Uber would not necessarily be a picnic for Chinese ride-sharing giant Didi. While an 85% market share looks unassailable, it will need a lot more money to secure its position.

I was prepping a post on why that is the case, but Dr. Richard Windsor at Radio Free Mobile beat me to it. Read the whole post. His bottom line:

Rising prices and lower reliability is likely to drive many users back into the arms of the taxi industry thereby achieving exactly the result for which the rules were created.

Windsor believes that the only logical response for Didi is a change in strategy, but finds it hard to see how any strategic choices open to Didi justify its $34 billion valuation. Fair enough.

Now, second-order effects time. Uber and Apple are Didi investors. As I mentioned in December:

Didi is a rapidly-growing company with a need for a huge war chest in order to secure its market position. Payback to investors will be some time down the line, and others will decide when and if Uber [or Apple] will ever see a dividend. Even if it does, the question will remain as to whether that dividend was a fair compensation for the price and a fair return to investors on the risk.

If you are an investor in either Uber or Apple, and you count the company’s holdings in Didi as a part of the firm’s underlying value or future earnings, have a look at Windsor’s post. You may want to re-run your numbers.

The rule for disruptive companies in China, regardless of provenance, is this: your future depends on more than just being able to make a handsome profit off of disruption. You have to convince a host of powerful individuals and groups that China is better off with the industry disrupted than with the status quo.

As I hurtle through 2,800kms of Chinese countryside, a question occurs to me about China’s massive urbanization. The shift is unprecedented, and for that reason alone begs for close examination.

The truth is, we are not examining the scale of urbanization as closely as perhaps we should. Is China urbanizing as quickly as statistics suggest? Or are we – at least in part – witnessing some statistical sleight of hand?

The thought that provoked me on this trip was the villages. Admittedly, my survey was back-of-napkin and limited to those villages alongside the high speed rail lines, but there seemed to be more building, more development, and little blight. That made me wonder. Are people really leaving their villages and heading to the Big City, or are they staying put, and statisticians taking villages and towns previously designated as “rural” or other non-urban areas and predesignating them as “urban?”

There is more to this question than statistical nit-picking. If many people are urbanizing in place, this means that China faces a very different set of challenges in addressing urbanization, including rethinking the infrastructure that needs to be built and probing whether this means that more of the country’s shrinking stock of arable land is in jeopardy.

For marketers, it would mean that a growing percentage of potential customers are physically beyond the reach of their current advertising, retail promotion, and distribution infrastructure.

Either way, it is time we tarted probing China’s urbanization statistics rather than take them as gospel.

Urbanizing in place – concept – the idea that China’s urbanization is not being driven entirely by migration from the countryside to the cities, but that large areas that Beijing’s statisticians might once have considered “rural” are now considered “urban.”

In-place urbanization could occur in one of three scenarios.

The physical area of a municipality has been expanded to include what was once surrounding countryside.

In the second scenario, a village that was once considered part of the countryside has now grown into a town that a demographer or statistician would now classify as urban.

In the third scenario, a group of villages in a given area are considered to be conglomerated as a single administrative entity and reclassified as a single town.

In these cases, China’s urbanization is taking place without migration, and presents a different set of policy, marketing, and personal challenges and opportunities than classical migration-based urbanization.

Speaking to a group of students touring China from the UK, I asked how they traveled from Shanghai to Beijing. Their response, of course, was that they flew.

I understand the rationale for flying inside of China. Under the best circumstances it is fast, and other forms of travel are harder to arrange from overseas.

That said, my recommendation to anyone organizing a trip to China for a group of executives, students, or scholars is to do yourself and them a favor: on the leg between Shanghai and Beijing, put them on a high-speed train, in either First or Business Class.

(Be aware that for reasons that escape everyone but the Ministry of Railways, Business Class is the better, more comfortable, and more expensive of the two.)

Even if flights are on time, the elapsed time from downtown Shanghai to Downtown Beijing (or the reverse) is not that much greater, especially if you purchase your train tickets in advance. And if there are flight delays (and there are frequent delays, because of weather, VIP flights, or because the Air Force feels like it), the trip can actually be faster. But that’s not the best reason to take the train.

The best reason to take the train is that the people you are squiring across China will actually get to see out their windows something more than modern cities and clouds. They will see farms, villages, half-completed roads, factories, and the insides of a half-dozen cities of a million souls or more that they had never heard of.

Send them home with visions of modern cities in their heads, and they will get the wrong idea about China, making the same mistake made by instant China experts like Thomas Friedman and Niall Ferguson. Expose them to a bigger slice of China, and they will understand that a large part of the nation is still 40, 70, of 100 years behind Shanghai. Then they will start to understand the forces that drive this Asian Leviathan. And is that not the point of bringing a group to China in the first place?

I get to talk to groups of businesspeople and business students on a regular basis, and one of the maxims I include in just about every speech or presentation is this:

Don’t get your China advice, whether generally or on a specific issue, from any single individual. China is too large and complex for you to trust the future of your enterprise in this market to the viewpoint of one source, however knowledgeable he/she/they may seem.

The news this week offers a superb example of why this is the case. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has had one if its periodic regulatory spasms regarding the Internet. One of the specific areas covered by the current policy outburst is the arcane but important area of top-level domains (TLDs).

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN, the international body that, among other things, operates the system that makes it possible for you to type “amazon.com” into your browser and get to a bookstore instead of an error page) has recently presided over an explosion of top-level domains (TLDs), those bits of an site name to the right of the dot, like “.com,” “.net,” and “.org.” Where there was once only a handful (in addition to nation-specific top-level domains,) there are now literally hundreds, if not thousands of these, and we’re all having to adjust to a world that includes “.law,” “.ninja,” “.guru,” and “.me,” and .”porn,” among hundreds of others.

China’s adjustment is coming in the form of a new regulation (“Interpretation (Reading) on Carrying Out the Domain Name Registration Services Market Special Action Policy”, promulgated by the MIIT on May 12) restricting how registries (the companies that own the top level domains and collect fees for domain names that use them) can sell domains to customers in China. This is causing a bit of a panic.

Chang Jian-Chuan, a Ph.D. and a research fellow who covers the field for a local registry, offers this piece in a leading industry publication as something of a palliative, and I agree that panic is unhelpful, but he loses me when he writes:

Nowadays a revision of the regulation is under way to reflect the latest expansion of registry operators. However, except for the new requirement that any foreign registry has to establish a legal entity in China, all the other requirements for the license have maintained unchanged. Therefore, it is fairly safe to conclude that there is no “tightened control” or “new move” against New gTLD registries and registrars.

What we have here is a disagreement (to put it mildly) over terms. While a superficial reading of the regulations may suggest no significant change, if you understand both the challenges faced by the companies affected and the knock-on effects of the law, it is clear that the change doe represent a new move that tightens control of the industry and endangers the business of many foreign registries currently selling into China.

From a business standpoint, the regulations throw the business of many registrars into a spin, if for no other reason than they are required to set up and register a local operation in China with $170,000 in registered capital, with local technicians and customer service personnel. Someone familiar with the global registry sector would know that most registries, including some of the larger ones, are not yet operating in China, and for all of those this represents a costly process and significant ongoing expense. For the vast majority of non-Chinese registries the cost will be prohibitive, in effect shutting them out of China.

When MIIT promulgates these revisions (and barring any last-minute amendments), they will substantially change the status quo for non-Chinese registries in China. While users in China will continue to be able to access websites outside China (subject to passing through the “Great Fire Wall“), in order to promote and serve Chinese customers, a non-Chinese registry will be required to set up a subsidiary registry or entrust a China-based registry to operate its TLDs in China. Failure to do so will likely result in Chinese registrars refusing to sell domain names under the non-Chinese registries TLDs and preventing resolution of any websites that are already registered under those TLDs.

Contrary to Dr. Chang’s fairly offhanded dismissal, a common sense reading of the regulations from the viewpoint of a foreign registry and from an attorney is that this regulation and its knock-on effects represent a new move and tightened control over the field, one that significantly changes the way most companies in an entire industry must operate in China.

While most of us shy from anything that may seem ad hominem, when seeking advice in China you must consider the provenance and possible motives of any advisor. For example, Dr. Chang is a former official with CNNIC working for a local Chinese registry. This would suggest that, far from being a dispassionate observer, Dr. Chang has some skin in the game. It is worth noting that his company, KNET, stands to gain if the new regulations are enforced to the greatest extent possible. It is also worth noting that his publishing an article in an international industry publication praising an MIIT regulation will not hurt his company’s regulations with its regulatory overlords at MIIT, and that it would have been impolitic – if not commercially suicidal – for Dr. Chang to have written a different opinion.

Let me be clear: the goal of this article is neither to impugn Dr. Chang nor his employer. I am sure Dr. Chang is a wonderful person and an academic of great integrity, and that his company is a fine organization operating in a highly competitive and heavily regulated industry.

The point, rather, is that the advice you receive from anyone about China is often influenced on where the individual comes from, where he or she sits, and the pressures under which he or she operates. The only way to get a true picture of the challenges and opportunities your company faces in China is to reach out to a range of advisors, tapping each for their thoughts, questioning each, and forming a picture based on all of the above.

In this intriguing essay, Shanghai-based consultant Kaiser suggests that for foreign companies, the glory days are over, and the only two strategies left are to either fight for one of the top two positions in your industry (against what might be brutal competition) or accept that your market in China will be modest, picking up what others cannot.

I really enjoyed the essay, because I like contrarian thinking on business in China. But I have a couple of problems right out of the gate.

First, I find it hard to accept that all companies in all industries face such a stark, binary choice. Airlines and banks do not face the same challenges or opportunities as McDonald’s or Intel.

Second, Kaiser’s choices seem better suited to Fortune 500 multinationals with a single line of business. Many large companies will do very well being modest players in multiple markets or product lines without ever being a market leader or settling for modest returns, and many small- and medium-sized businesses will gorge themselves on a modest market position.

Third, the market is immense, and opens the door for a wide range of niche and multi-niche strategies that would be incredibly lucrative, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses from outside of China.

Finally, and perhaps most important, Kaiser implies that there is but a single motive that brings companies to China: profits from China operations. For many companies this is true, but for others, being in China offers other rewards. Companies in the mobile industry benefit from participating in the largest, most lucrative market in the world; other firms are in China so they can better defend against Chinese rivals elsewhere; still others could care less about profits, as China drives volume that supports lower unit costs in more lucrative markets.

One reason there are few good “China strategy” books out there is that there is no good, blanket approach for China that spans across a wide range of companies and industries over a modest span of time. Corporate strategy is bespoke, like the course for a ship. When we write books, we can talk about avoiding storms, rocks, and shoals, and we can talk about the processes that lead to great strategy or effective implementation. Everything else is situational.

Much of my March was spent working with clients who are thinking through some of the issues facing the growing data center market in China. For the uninitiated, a “data center” is a place that houses anywhere from one to tens of thousands of servers. This blog sits in a data center, your bank information sits in a data center, there are a lot of them, and these places are growing.

“From the year 2003 and working backwards to the beginning of human history, we generated five exabytes–that’s 5,000,000,000 GB – of information.

By last year, we were cranking out that much data every two days.

By next year, we’ll be doing it every 10 minutes.”

That quote was from two years ago. Draw the curve in your mind, and you can figure that, conservatively, today we could be generating five exabytes of data every five minutes. Not all of that is going to sit in phones, laptops, external hard drives, thumb drives, or those little SD cards that we stick in our digital cameras. Much of it has to sit in data centers.

The Great Heat Sink

Which is fine, until you consider that data centers suck energy the way blue whales suck krill: in massive quantities, and with large amounts of undesirable waste at the end of the process. In the case of data centers, that waste comes in the form of heat, which then demands more energy to power cooling, which in turn generates heat. The bigger data centers get, the more heat we are talking about. And data centers are getting quite large indeed, measured in millions of square feet of servers stacked like so much electronic cord wood.

Some data centers have started addressing heat as a resource, rather than a waste-product: IBM’s Swiss data center heats a pool; Telehouse in the UK is heating homes in London’s Docklands district; and Notre Dame’s Center for Reserch Computing is heating the flowers of a local municipal greenhouse with the heat from a rack of high-performance computing nodes.

Not everyplace where there are data centers needs heat, though. Some places simply need energy. As any engineer will tell you, where there is heat, there is potential energy. The key will be to capture enough heat so that it can be efficiently turned into energy, for example through steam turbines. Energy generated like this – through the waste heat of data centers, we will call “data-thermal energy.”

Data-Thermal China

China is a natural place for the development of data-thermal energy. The country is early enough in the cycle of development for data centers to start designing its largest server farms to capture and channel heat efficiently. And scale will not be an issue in China. Leaving out government-run data centers entirely, some commercial data centers, like one 6.3 million square-foot beast under construction in Langfang just outside of Beijing, will have more floor space than the Pentagon.

The ability to capture and use waste heat efficiently also opens the prospect of cutting down on air-conditioning costs. If the heat can simply be blown – or sucked – away from the servers and into a central collection point for energy generation, the need to actually cool the air should abate a bit.

There is considerable engineering work to be done, but this is a worthy (if not essential) direction of thinking for the people designing and growing China’s server farms. It will demand imagination and discipline: the old way of doing things – stack ’em high, chill ’em down, and blow the hot air out the window – is cheap and pervasive. As the costs of energy grow and sustainability becomes more important, however, Big Data will need to start seeing itself as a utility, not just a customer.

Last week Ogilvy’s Justin Knapp asked me if I was aware of a list of China-based overseas-listed companies that are considering de-listing overseas. It was a good question, and I have no doubt that somewhere in the dank bowels of Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley are a clutch of gnomes/interns who are playing spreadsheet games and cooking up such lists.

To me lists are troublesome because they are so limited. By specifying a set of companies, the chance to miss others is too high. What is more useful is profiling, a process by which we identify what KINDS of companies are best suited to de-list.

While I expect it to evolve over time, I have started to craft such a profile. I’ll admit, it is VERY basic at the moment, but it does allow us to eliminate a fairly large number of overseas listings from consideration.

The first wave or two of offshore delistings will thus have two or more of the following characteristics:

1. Small- or mid-cap companies. Delisting offshore will be a costly process, so we can presume that companies undertaking the effort expect to be able to find a buyer or buyers for their shares in China. The capitalization of China’s formal and informal share markets is improving, but Shanghai is not New York and Shenzhen is not London. The pool of money is not large enough to sustain the wholesale repatriation of large-cap stocks. Mid-sized firms, with listed equity of up to $300-$500 million, however, should have little trouble re-listing at home, and select smaller firms will be able to tap China’s growing pool of private equity.

2. Companies who need to explain their businesses to offshore investors, but whom local investors know well. Say “Shanda” to your average U.S. investor, and he’ll look at you as if he’s waiting for the rest of the sentence. Most Chinese punters, however, know the company and won’t need it explained. As much as we might like to deny it, this “household name” recognition translates into lower investor relations costs and, in China especially, higher valuations.

3. Companies with complex ownership structures. The government is not comfortable with unorthodox shareholding arrangements that seem to skirt the law. The VIE structure I’ve discussed here several times falls into that category, as, arguably, do companies like Huawei, which has recently faced questions about its employee stock ownership program. Complex structures not only rankle government officials and foreign investors with fresh memories of Enron, they also demand a lot time and focus, and are significant time-sucks for corporate leadership. The easy answer is to dump the complex structures required to snare foreign capital and bring the equity home.

4. Companies with “State Secrets.” For all of the government’s lip service about building strong, credible Chinese companies, what is more important to the party is control over the large and high-growth enterprises of the nation. This is not some Neanderthal chest thumper: the interaction between officialdom and commerce in China is…complex. At the core of the recent dustup over global accountants auditing local firms is a fear of what such audits might reveal – not about the firms, mind you, but about opportunistic government officials. If you enjoy the sensation of your neck hairs levitating, get into a conversation with a bunch of auditors over an adult beverage. Nobody is quite sure how deep the rabbit hole goes, but any company with such accounting issues is likely to want to get clear of foreign bourses, preferably before an offshore enforcement action reveals too much of the family linen.

5. Ego listings. Over the last decade there have been a flood of listings, many by companies who don’t really need the capital and who could certainly do without the hassles, but who listed anyway in order to gain the prestige of the offshore listing. Such baubles are increasingly expensive and troublesome, and there are surely a few Chinese founder/CEOs who have watched Muddy Waters administer its transparency high-colonic to Sino-Forest with growing horror. These folks will quietly buy shares back, shut the listing or sell the pink sheet, and slink out of town.

Again, this is all a work in progress, and this list will evolve over time. However, you can see the outlines what will be left when this tide recedes, and what, if any, Chinese companies are liable to seek offshore listings in the future.

Ryan Block, Editor Emeritus of Engadget, offers a fun little post about innovation at Qualcomm spark. His lede is provocative: he notes that even though Edison patented the light bulb, he didn’t invent it. An Englishman named Joseph Swan patented his in the UK first.

, will likely agree that Mr. Edison had at least as much right as anyone to his patent, especially when you include his painstaking work on finding the right element for the filament and industrializing the invention. (Even Swan admitted as much.)

Edison deserved his patent, but the most important lesson from Edison and the light bulb is that he didn’t sit back on his duff and try to extract royalties as others improved the technology. As Block notes:

Better still: only a few months after Edison received his patent, he’d already moved on to the next iteration, which increased the bulb’s life a thousand-fold. The story of Edison and his light bulb isn’t just a story of invention; it’s about the invariable trajectory of progress.

I want to take Block’s point a step further. Our intellectual property protection system in the west is focused on protecting inventions, to the point that the IPR bar has all of us thinking about how to protect each and every incremental innovation in the process.

For the most successful innovators, however, what is important is not the increments, but the stream of innovation. There is value to protecting your work, but that should never detract from the effort to continually out-innovate oneself. Due respect to Nathan Myhrvold, the future does not belong the the companies who hire more lawyers than engineers. If there was a resounding lesson from Oracle’s loss in court to Google, it is this: those who focus on defending the status quo more than building the future will have the future taken away from them.

As I have noted here and in Euromoney Magazine, we are witnessing the beginning of an important shift for Chinese enterprises and the way they are financed. A growing number of Chinese businesses that have listed overseas, especially mid-sized and growing companies, are quietly de-listing from the NYSE and NASDAQ.

Adam Gefvert offers two more examples of this delisting trend at Seeking Alpha, China Medical Technologies and ZST Digital Networks, and offers a description of how they are doing so by hiring proxies to purchase shares on their behalf.

Leaving aside questions of propriety or legality of this process, it offers an important insight. While the Chinese companies that have listed in the U.S. did so with great fanfare, they will most likely depart quietly, attracting as little attention as possible. I suspect we will wake one morning and find that NYSE and NASDAQ no longer boast a bevy of mid-sized Chinese stocks.

Why is this important? For Chinese companies, it means that they will focus on listing in places where their value is understood by the common punter. For the small investor, participating in China’s economy will become more difficult.

In an essay from 15 years ago that remains one of the best background pieces on Chinese nationalism that I have ever read, professor Jeremy Barmé of the Australian National University delves into the historical and philosophical underpinnings of this rising ethos.

There is a growing consensus among Beijing-watchers that nationalism has replaced economic development as the primary driver of domestic Chinese politics on the eve of a generational leadership transition. For that reason, there is no better time than now to dive beneath the surface of this phenomenon and understand it from the roots.

I read Barme’s piece with great interest. While I didn’t come away with any profound conclusions, I see what is happening today with somewhat greater clarity. It also helps peer behind the Red Rhetoric of Bo Xilai’s campaigns to see something older and more elemental at work.

Despite valiant efforts to convince ourselves otherwise, it is a truism that the marketing and communications crafts have lost their way after a decade-long deluge of online media. We put on a brave face in public, but in truth we have been attempting to deal with an entirely new phenomenon with old tools.

I am on the verge of taking a six-month semi-sabbatical in 2010 to read, write, and blog about this issue and what it means in the context of the rise of Asia generally and China specifically. Frustrated by the often soporific, wishful, It’s Going to Be Okay As Long As We Buy 20% More Display Ads This Year thinking that passes for futurism in our business, I have started to prepare by going back to the seminal thinking that laid the groundwork for modern marketing and communications. I figure this is a safe bet, based in part on my status as an amateur historian, and in part on my wife’s success as an Neo-Grahamian value investor.

My first three stops in the process are David Ogilvy’s Ogilvy on Advertising, Claude Hawkins’ Scientific Advertising, (Ogilvy based a lot of his approach on Hawkins’ work), and, somewhat closer to home for a corporate communicator, Edward Bernays’ superior Propaganda.

Full disclosure: I am an advertising skeptic (too much push in the way it is practiced today), and a public relations skeptic (too much spin, not enough conversation), but I think the issue is more in how these tools are practiced and the belief systems that have built up around them than in the crafts themselves. In Tim Burton’s Batman, the Joker famously proclaims of Gotham “this town needs an enema.” He could just as well been strolling up Madison Avenue.

So I hunt for the grains of truth supporting the ziggurats of a decaying industry.

I’ve just finished Bernays for the second time (a simple feat – Bernays was so pithy that his work disappears on my bookshelf twixt weighter tomes), and I explained what I thought was one of his enduring truths in an OpEd in Media Asia: The public relations industry has become the captive of its tactics, bastions of execution that have either forgotten how to be counselors on business conduct or who have blown whatever credibility they may have once had in that role.

And China, where the industry has an opportunity to start with something of a blank slate, we are off to a tough start. Execution is wonderful, but we are all too often either swimming in a sea of spin or we are reduced to wrangling reporters.

The other two works are somewhat harder going, for me, anyway. David Ogilvy was the quintessential (M)Ad Man, and his prose carries the assurance of a man offering a service for which the need is a given. Hawkins is somewhat better, but the matter of advertising is a matter of “how” rather than “if.”

Yet good things surface. Ogilvy assumed pandemic attention-deficit disorder in his audiences, and he built his craft firm in the conviction that people had to be convinced to care. This seems self-evident, but it is too often forgotten in China. How, after all, are we to convince anyone of anything with a commercial that lasts less time than it takes us to read a headline?

To me, banner ads, search ads, and meat-grinder public relations that counts clippings from China’s content-xerox websites too often assume the audience cares.

Something is wrong, and so many of us know it. If we are ever going to have the cojones to do something about it, we need to begin by calling bulls**t on ourselves.